For the last three years I’ve painted almost only in red. Not out of preference, but as a search — for raw beauty, and for elegance. Red is where I look for both.
Why red
Red is the first colour of culture. Long before we had words for most things, we had this one — ochre on cave walls, blood, fire, the last light of the day. It carries the longest wavelength the eye can see, and somehow it holds almost everything a person can feel: passion and love, revolution and warmth, elegance — and, in the same breath, anger, lust, danger. One colour, and the whole range of being alive sits inside it. That contradiction is what I paint into.
Raw beauty and elegance
Beauty and elegance matter to me more than almost anything — but not the polished, decorative kind. I’m after the raw version, the beauty that still has some danger in it. Red lets me hold both at once: something refined, and something that still burns.
Rothko
Rothko taught me the most. He is the painter of emotion: he built depth from thin layer over thin layer until the colour seemed to breathe, and standing in front of one of his paintings you end up standing in front of yourself. I chase that same depth by the opposite road — where he laid thin washes with a brush, I build with a spatula, often more than ten layers of oil one over the other, until the red stops being a surface and becomes something you can fall into. The paintings catch the light and shine so hard they almost turn to mirrors; the detail only reveals itself depending on the hour, so no two viewings are ever quite the same.
The work
This body of work — the RED 2026 series and the Studies on Red — is oil on canvas, painted at scale, some pieces as large as 2.5 × 1.8 metres. Deep, saturated reds, built to be lived with — on a wall at home, in a company, or at an event.
Shown at Soho House Berlin
The series was shown recently at Soho House Berlin, where the large red canvases stood among the chandeliers and dark wood of the members’ rooms — the kind of setting these paintings are made for.
Enquiries
Originals from the RED series are available. To see a piece in person, or to commission something new, write to me at brok@brokclark.com.
